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Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

While Anthropic and Open AI get 80% of the attention here, it's impressive to see how much Google is doing: near frontier model, fast models, open weight models, image generation, video generation, music generation, robotics, etc.

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It's certainly an odd situation where Google is on the forefront of all these emerging technologies while the latest chatbots from OpenAI and Anthropic are getting breathless press releases and wildly hyperbolic coverage ("rogue AIs" "too dangerous, must be banned" etc...)

Google acting like a normal but competent company that's just chugging away, meanwhile the hype cycle is propping up its upstart competitors to truly ludicrous valuations.

> Google acting like a normal but competent company that's just chugging away

Competent is a stretch. Google's AI offering seems to be, once again, PM led–lots of constantly-changing brands being merged and deprecated with zero customer support or service.

They'll almost certainly be one of the survivors. Their technical competece is unmatched. But that doesn't mean they have a great product in the way both OpenAI and Anthropic do. (Outside their datacentres, which are a legitimate feat.)

Google has never been good at supporting developers, and it absolutely loathes end users. Support for everything that is not their ad ecosystem is miserable. There's never any long term plan, everything gets deprecated and bitrots.

After all this time it's still a pain point just to pay them for a Gemini API key.

So crazy, at one point they had 3 different systems for interacting with Gemini, all with different auth.

For a company that prides themselves on the smartest engineers, they really struggle with the basics

Mm, however the more I experience of the world, the more I find this matches the description up-thread:

> Google acting like a normal but competent company

Is it messed up and weird? Yup. Still normal though. Worse, this is matching the baseline of competence I find in so many other places.

A lot of this is having to incorporate with existing billing systems for their customers. OpenAI and Anthropic have it easier by having no previous billing setup to be compatible with.

Don't forget: resources

Google wins on infrastructure and creativity (NotebookLM, etc) but entirely lacks product coherence. The ecosystem is a mess, just like Microsoft's offering, and I don't think this is a coincidence but rather a symptom of the type of company in which these two companies have evolved.

Furthermore, Gemini is just all around a less trustworthy and mature model, for many reasons. Very smart but lacking the precision and holistically exhibited in the more recent models from OpenAI and Anthropic. On the flip side, Google's work on Gemma is unmatched.

Yeah, something surprising to me was that I can't even add a custom MCP to gemini. It has tons of missing features.

Everything would be perfect if only you were CEO of both companies!

I can say a portrait doesn’t look like a person even if I can’t do better, googles product range is an absolute mess and using it is a nightmare - I don’t know how to fix the company but I know the outcome is bad.

I thought Google was a mess until I started working at a Microsoft shop for the first time. Boy it's astonishing. I've got two versions of Outlook on my computer, neither of which is as quick to load as Thunderbird was 20 years ago. My team uses Azure DevOps for our git forge, which is somehow a completely different product than GitHub. There are multiple versions of Planner in Teams, where the free version's features are not a strict subset of the premium - there are features that are blocked if you pay.

The thing that gets me with Google is that they've killed too many products I used daily (RIP Inbox and Google Podcasts) for me to be able to trust that any new offering will exist in 5 years.

    “I also see that I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working if you want to remote in and check"

Cdr. Reid Wiseman to Mission Control, Artemis II, Earth-Moon Coast.

What is the purpose of this comment?

> Google acting like a normal but competent company that's just chugging away,

Chugging away not releasing products or releasing ones worse than their competition typically. Not sure that’s what a normal competent company should be doing.

I think it’s because, right now, THE use case for LLMs is computer programming. Everything else has been deranked. And openAI and Anthropic make good models for specifically computer programming.

I think LLMs might have other use cases, but all the ones that were dreamt up basically disappeared.

> Google acting like a normal but competent company

I am just waiting for the 10 AI models or Chatbot Apps competing with one another like the 10 messenger Apps.

Wait? What are you talking about? We're already drowning in them. There's literally more than Google messenger apps. An incomplete list of Google AI chatbots currently online:

    Gemini
    Gemini Live
    Gemini Code Assist
    Gemini for Google Cloud
    NotebookLM
    Gmail
    Google Docs
    Google Sheets
    Google Slides
    Google Drive
    Google Chat
    Google Meet
    Google Calendar
    Google Forms
    Google Vids
    AppSheet
    Workspace Studio
    Google Search
    Google app
    Google Chrome
    Google Lens
    Google Maps
    Google Flights
    Google Hotels
    Google Shopping
    Google Photos
    YouTube
    Google Messages
    Google Translate
    Android
    Circle to Search
    Google Home
    Google Play
    Pixel apps and features
    Google Flow
    Google AI Studio

I mean they did practically invent LLMs and a lot of modern machine learning stuff. Or I should say researchers at Google. Makes sense they would keep at it

> I mean they did practically invent LLMs

Didn't all those authors leave Google?

It’s because their products are really bad. Last time I tried Gemini it repeatedly lied about running internet search when explicitly asked to do it. I know their models benchmark really well, but in real world the performance is abysmal.

Maybe it was just using Google Search, and not finding anything ...

It admitted not running any search when pushed on it. Though yeah, google search is so bad right now that I understand why you'd consider that.

> Google acting like a normal but competent company that's just chugging away

People are too quick to forget racially-diverse Nazi soldiers and other hilariously incompetent stuff that has been going around their generative AI efforts just a couple of years ago. Google look like they finally getting their shit together under immense competitive pressure but I would keep my eye on them for a few more years before starting calling them "competent".

Google DeepMind was at the forefront of AI, and they are currently developing new concepts while others chase benchmark percentages.

Yes, I am surprised that no one talks about the 'live' feature in Gemini app. With camera turned on, it has helped me fix things which I have no clue about.

And protein folding + Nobel Prize

Google DeepMind disbands its Nobel-prize winning AlphaFold team

https://www.engadget.com/2225849/google-shuts-down-alphafold...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49098375

I won't comment much on this, but I'd say these articles are 2-3 years late and reduces the agency of the people, who in many cases moved to Gemini because they wanted to work on LLMs

And AlphaGo Zero .. probably the first real-world deployment of a self-improving system that beat humans.

> probably the first real-world deployment of a self-improving system that beat humans.

Isn't that Checkers right from the dawn of reinforcement learning?

I think that credit might go to IBM:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TD-Gammon

It was a huge advancement but it did not beat the world champion. AlphaGo is noted for being a self-learning system that became better than all humans. Chess engines had long been there but were not self-learning before AlphaZero.

Baffles me how this is not that well known

I recommend reading „The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence“ from Sebastian Mallaby. It offers a detailed glimpse into the reasons behind your observation regarding Google/DeepMind and the other frontier labs. best book I read so far on my current vacation.

It’s basically because LLMs supersede all of these. The ability to reason, research, and write code applies to everything else and will speed up the innovation cycles there significantly.

Google is losing in the race that really matters

While I agree, it’s hard to trust Google not to kill this off in the future. They’re not winning and the prospect of dumping their own for a partnership with another AI company isn’t out of the picture.

thing is, google have a track record of dropping support or just killing of projects. Personally, I view most of google's products and services as a business risk, because you never know when they will kill it.

and building inference hardware

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